Growth Lead, Pilot
Franchises
$133-179k
Plus equity
Bookkeeping services for startups
Be an early applicant
Bookkeeping services for startups
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$133-179k
Plus equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
To help small businesses and startups to achieve their commercial goals by taking care of the CFO services, tax preparation and bookkeeping.
Role
Who you are
- You’re early in your career but have strong business judgment
- You’ve taken ownership of something ambiguous before
- You’re excited to do the work yourself—not just design strategy
- You’re comfortable navigating messy, multi-stakeholder environments
- 2–5 years of experience in consulting, banking, startups, GTM roles, or similar
- MBA or equivalent experience is a plus, not required
- Exposure to SMBs, multi-location businesses, or operations-heavy industries is helpful
What the job involves
- Pilot provides bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services powered by software—helping companies operate with better financial visibility and confidence. We’re building the modern finance back office. We’re early in building our franchise channel and are looking for someone to help us figure it out from the ground up
- We’re hiring a Growth Lead to build Pilot’s franchise channel from scratch. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role
- You’ll operate like a mini–GM, staying deeply hands-on—running experiments, talking to operators and franchisors, launching campaigns, and driving pipeline yourself. This role is a strong fit for someone early in their career who wants to own a real business problem end-to-end
- Understand how franchise systems buy (corporate vs franchisee vs both)
- Identify high-potential segments (e.g., QSR, fitness, home services, multi-unit operators)
- Test different entry points (top-down via franchisor vs bottom-up via operators)
- Launch scrappy tests across channels (events, outbound support, partnerships, content, paid)
- Try different GTM motions (corporate deals, multi-location bundles, pilot programs)
- Use results to determine what scales
- Talk directly to franchise owners, operators, and corporate teams
- Understand operational pain points (unit economics, reporting, cash flow, multi-entity complexity)
- Translate insights into messaging and acquisition strategies
- Build landing pages, write emails, run outreach, and launch campaigns yourself
- Stand up webinars or events tailored to franchise operators
- Move quickly with minimal process or support
- Be accountable for generating qualified opportunities and contributing to revenue
- Partner closely with Sales to refine positioning and improve conversion
- Focus on what drives deals across different buyer types
- Identify and engage franchise ecosystems (POS systems, franchise consultants, associations)
- Run co-marketing or co-selling experiments
- Help Pilot become relevant within franchise networks
- You’ll own a new growth channel with real revenue impact
- You’ll work across Sales, Partnerships, and Product
- You’ll gain exposure to complex GTM problems (multi-entity buyers, channel strategy)
- You’ll help define how Pilot wins in a large, underpenetrated market
- What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months):
- Clear signal on whether top-down (franchisor) or bottom-up (operator) motion works best
- 2–3 channels consistently generating qualified pipeline
- Early wins with franchise groups or multi-unit operators
- Initial repeatable plays for acquiring and expanding within franchise systems
Our take
Back office operations such as bookkeeping can be an unwelcome distraction and expense for businesses. Pilot is the largest provider of back office services for startups and small businesses in the US, aiming to take care of a company's back office so they can focus on their core activities.
Founded in 2016. Pilot has attracted an impressive range of customers including Bolt, r2c and Pathrise. The company's proposition is more than just bookkeeping software, providing services that would ordinarily be provided by a fractional CFO. This empowers small businesses and startups to make better budgeting and spending decisions without the need of an expensive finance department hire.
The company evidently excels in customer service, with the vast majority of its business driven by customer referrals and organic interest. Going forward, Pilot aims to become to startups and medium-sized firms what AWS is to cloud computing - a comprehensive, easily scalable solution that prevents the need to reinvent a necessary but non-core function from scratch.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-4% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Mar 2021
$40m
SERIES C
Jan 2021
$60m
SERIES C
Total funding: $158.3m
Company benefits
- Development opportunities & employee happiness initiatives
- Seasoned founding team that has led companies through two prior successful startups and acquisitions (by Oracle and Dropbox)
- Flexible vacation/time-off policy
- All federal holidays are observed
- Wellness benefits such as Modern Health, Headscape, One Medical, Aaptiv and Rightway
- Parental leave for birthing or non-birthing parents – 100% pay for 12 weeks
- 401(k) plan
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Waseem Daher
(Chair & Co-Founder)They studied at MIT before founding Ksplice, where they spent 3 years as COO, and working at Oracle and Dropbox. Having founded Zulip in August 2012, they co-founded Pilot in January 2017.
Jessica McKellar
(CEO & Co-Founder)Previously, they were the founder and the VP of Engineering for a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where they then served as a Director of Engineering.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 6 more jobs at Pilot